Backlog Studies eBook

Thefire-tender. Women are often
ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they may have a
notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more
than a man in business matters; but I tell you, as
a rule, that if men would consult their wives, they
would go a deal straighter in business operations
than they do go.

TheParson. We are all poor sinners.
But I’ve another indictment against the women
writers. We get no good old-fashioned love-stories
from them. It’s either a quarrel of discordant
natures one a panther, and the other a polar bear—­for
courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway
accident; or a long wrangle of married life between
two unpleasant people, who can neither live comfortably
together nor apart. I suppose, by what I see,
that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful
uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have
no doubt that the majority of married people live
more happily than the unmarried. But it’s
easier to find a dodo than a new and good love-story.

Mandeville. I suppose the old style of plot
is exhausted. Everything in man and outside of
him has been turned over so often that I should think
the novelists would cease simply from want of material.

TheParson. Plots are no more exhausted
than men are. Every man is a new creation, and
combinations are simply endless. Even if we did
not have new material in the daily change of society,
and there were only a fixed number of incidents and
characters in life, invention could not be exhausted
on them. I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope,
but I can never reproduce a figure. No, no.
I cannot say that you may not exhaust everything else:
we may get all the secrets of a nature into a book
by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it deals
with men.

The Parson’s vehemence came very near carrying
him into a sermon; and as nobody has the privilege
of replying to his sermons, so none of the circle
made any reply now.

Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing
on end, to hear a minister defending the novel; but
it did not interrupt the general silence. Silence
is unnoticed when people sit before a fire; it would
be intolerable if they sat and looked at each other.

The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville
remarked, as they rose to go, that it had a spring
sound in it, but it was as cold as winter. The
Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing
in the sun a spring song, it was a winter bird, but
it sang.

SEVENTH STUDY

We have been much interested in what is called the
Gothic revival. We have spent I don’t know
how many evenings in looking over Herbert’s
plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his
vain efforts to cover with Gothic roofs the vast number
of large rooms which the Young Lady draws in her sketch
of a small house.